And Dance with Me
by Ryeloza
Summary: A brief look at the love lives of the men of Charmed. This is a companion piece to Hold My Hand.
1. Andy

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Charmed_. Yes, I couldn't even accomplish that during my fanfic hiatus.

**A/n: **This is a companion piece to my other work, "Hold My Hand." It is entirely unnecessary to read that in order to enjoy this (which I greatly hope you do).

**And Dance with Me**

A companion piece to **Hold My Hand**

a story by **Ryeloza**

**Part One: Andy**

**One**

The first Halliwell he kissed was not Prue, but Piper. She was five and he was seven and his mother had been tasked with watching her and Phoebe, still a baby, because their grandmother was off somewhere with Prue and their mother wasn't home. Piper was going through some phase where she wore a pink tutu everywhere and danced and danced and danced and most of the time this annoyed Andy to no end. But that day, with Prue gone and the afternoon sun blaring through the windows, Andy felt some peculiar urge to play big brother to her little sister.

So he danced with her.

Around and around in circles, Piper barking commands as if she knew everything when truly she knew nothing. Andy followed her lead, laughing when she told him to bow before taking her hand.

When they finally stopped the sun was sinking lower in the sky and Piper was mad with giggles and in some compulsion, Andy simply bent and kissed her cheek. Piper had beamed up at him.

Twenty minutes later the world fell apart because his best friend's mother was dead.

A few years down the road, Piper told him, "You were my last real smile," and broke his heart.

**Two**

The homecoming dance his senior year was a complete disaster. He'd asked Jenny Hutch, who was popular and athletic and slim and blonde and so completely _not_ Prue, and she'd spent the weeks leading up to the dance cooing to anyone who would listen that Andy Trudeau was taking her to the dance. Andy knew this would happen; Andy wanted this to happen; but Andy's intentions did not have the desired effect.

Swaying to the music in the streamer-strewn gym, Andy was only able to stare across the room where Prue sat manning a punch table. She was decked in head-to-toe black with too much make-up on. She was filing her nails and shaking her foot impatiently and everything about her screamed that she was only there as some inane form of torture brought on by commitments she had made before she became _this_ Prue. Andy wanted to despise _this_ Prue because she was rude and selfish and ignored the entire world around her, but he couldn't because he was too in love with Prue to loathe any part of her. So he was stuck with a girl he had only asked out to make Prue jealous while Prue remained blatantly unaware that Andy was anything other than a nonsexual being.

He wanted to ditch Jenny, overturn the table where she sat, yell at her until she saw sense and then kiss her until she melted.

But he just kept dancing instead.

**Three**

Andy met Susan Leary his first year of college. She was a ray of sunshine in a world that Andy did not feel entirely comfortable navigating. High school had been bliss in a way; he'd been a popular jock and had a lot of friends and, in the end, had the perfect girlfriend. But these things faded away as the summer did as he didn't make his college basketball team, his friends began to disperse to various schools, and Prue looked at him with weepy blue eyes and told him that she couldn't be tied to home in that way (as if her family wasn't enough of a tie to keep her strapped to home for an eternity).

But things got better as they are want to do. Susan burst into his life one late night with a knock on the door and a gaggle of giggling girls behind her. "Do me a favor and kiss me, okay?" she said, and the next thing Andy knew he was lip-locked with a girl he didn't know and a Polaroid camera flashed brightly. When she pulled back she smiled, thanked him, and left him in a daze.

It was a perfect kiss.

The next day she found him in the cafeteria with his roommates and sat down next to him, promptly explaining that it was some sorority hazing and that she hoped she hadn't offended him. Then she stole some of his French fries.

And so he loved her.

**Four**

They were married on a Saturday evening at his church and the reception was an informal affair at her parents' house. They couldn't afford much else with him fresh out of the police academy and Susan still paying back thousands in student loans. But they were happy.

Then they weren't happy.

Andy thought it was a hundred little things. Money didn't stop being an issue and they both worried constantly. Although she tried to support him, Susan had never quite understood Andy's drive to be a police officer when there was so much danger involved. His parents and hers constantly dropped not-so-subtle hints about grandchildren that neither of them were ready for. Soon they laughed less and less and argued more and more.

The word divorce tripped off his tongue before hers, but Susan had not seemed shocked by its sudden appearance in his vocabulary.

"It's for the best," she said at one point. "We just weren't meant to be married."

"Why?" Andy asked before he could stop himself. "We were so happy once."

Susan shrugged slowly, as though lifting an unbearable weight on her shoulders. "Because," she finally said softly, "you never dance with me anymore."

And it was everything and nothing as an explanation.

**Five**

Andy wanted to love again, but he didn't give his heart easily as it was rarely handled with care. And after the divorce trying for a relationship seemed impossible, so he buried himself in his work. There were set-ups, of course, and he was asked out enough that he never lost confidence, but no one was ever right.

Prue stumbled back into his life so innocently that Andy took it to be divine intervention. When he saw her for the first time in a decade, something inside of him warmed for the first time in as long. And it wasn't just that he loved her, because he had loved her in some way for his entire life; it was more.

"No one knows me like you do," Prue whispered to him one night in bed.

And that was the heart of the truth.

They were never quite right romantically and Andy broke her heart with as much aplomb as she'd broken his ten years before. But this time, he couldn't let her slip away into a world he wasn't part of. He was selfish and he needed her and truthfully she needed him too. They were soul mates, in some unconventional sense of the words.

In the end they always found one another.


	2. Leo

**A/n: **Thanks for the reviews so far! I really, really appreciate them. Hopefully you'll all enjoy this chapter too. Please let me know what you think!

**And Dance with Me**

A companion piece to **Hold My Hand**

a story by **Ryeloza**

**Part Two: Leo**

**One**

Before the Depression cost his father his job and required the entire Wyatt family to find more creative hobbies to support their livelihood, Leo and his sister Mariella took dance classes on Thursday nights. Mrs. George ran the classes in her living room and rarely smiled. As the youngest boy there, Leo was forced to pair with Mrs. George's granddaughter, Beth, who was a year younger than him and also there out of family duty rather than pleasure.

One Thursday, Mariella was ill and Leo was tasked with walking to Mrs. George's by himself. While plodding along he came across Beth, who also trudged to class with her head hung. When he greeted her, she halted and slowly, reluctantly, raised her head to look at him. Her eyes filled with tears and as she turned he saw that her dress was covered in mud and grass stains.

"My brothers pushed me in the mud," she explained between hiccupping sobs. "They decided to go fishing instead of coming to class and when I said I wanted to come they shoved me and I fell. And now Grandma is going to yell at me."

"Oh," said Leo, who really didn't understand much about brothers or mean grandmothers. He bit his lip, thoughtful for a moment. "Well we could do something even better than fishing. And a lot better than dance class."

"Really?"

Leo nodded. "Sure. Come on."

So instead of class, there was a motion picture and ice cream and laughing.

Leo didn't mind when he had to quit dancing.

**Two**

They danced to French music at their wedding.

Leo's mother was French and Lillian was in awe of all things French, so it only seemed fitting. When he was deployed to the South Pacific instead of to Europe he almost felt disappointed that he would never step foot in France. After, he was grateful: had his death occurred in France certainly the lovely connotations would have been ruined for Lillian.

As it was, his new life began in France as his first charge lived in Paris. And the city was beautiful and brilliant, just as he had always believed.

Just as they had always believed.

It was everything he had lost and he hated it.

For the rest of his days, he became teary-eyed whenever he heard "La Vie en Rose."

**Three**

He had a charge—a future Whitelighter—named Letty Greal who had laughing green eyes and a mess of wildly curly blonde hair. He didn't see her often because she didn't often need him; her life, as people were apt to say, was somewhat charmed. She had the big house and the wonderful husband and the adoring children; the job she loved and the friends who always had time for her. But when things began to fall apart, Leo was there to pick up the pieces.

The youngest child died in a car crash and, in his favorite guise as a handyman, Leo began to spend more and more time with Letty. It was hard. It was hard to see her look ragged and broken. It was hard to see her cry. It was hard to see her broken. Most of all, it was excruciating to not be able to tell her who he really was and what she was destined to become.

To give her hope.

"John and I are getting divorced," she told him quietly in the kitchen one morning.

"I'm sorry," Leo said. And he was. He had seen them before, their happiness, and it was just another loss in their lives.

She was quiet for a moment. "Do you think it's possible to move on from what happened? John told me that it's like I died too, and I know that's true. I feel like I died too. But how are you supposed to keep living after…after something like that?"

Leo stopped tinkering and turned to look Letty in the eye. "You can only live for yourself," he said quietly. "So you look for some other meaning in your life, never forgetting what you lost, but moving forward all the same."

"Did you lose someone too?"

Leo paused for a long moment, but Letty didn't back down from the question and she seemed to know that he needed the time, even when he turned away from her and back to his work.

"Yes," he finally said. "I lost my whole family, actually."

He doesn't add that he doesn't think he could survive this for a second time.

**Four**

For months his and Piper's only relationship revolved around working at the club together. The club was a place of conflicting emotions: pleasure and pain; joy and agony. After, once Dan was gone and life was perfect if only for a minute, they began to go to P3 just to hang out and the connotations changed; ambivalence went out the window.

Still, it was to his detriment one night when Piper took him by the hand and said, "Let's dance."

The music was fast and thumping and Piper danced like everyone else did while Leo stood awkwardly and tried to find a groove. Piper looked at him curiously, eyebrow crooked, and said, "What? You don't like dancing?"

"This isn't dancing," he said stubbornly. Capturing her hands in his, forcing her to still her jilted movements, he pulled her into a traditional frame that would have made Mrs. George proud. "This is dancing."

Piper laughed as he led her in tiny circles—there was no room to move on the dance floor.

**Five**

Their marriage was an elaborate dance that neither he nor Piper knew the steps to, so there were many stumbles and missteps and awkward times when she went to twirl and he was left spinning in another direction. In these moments he sometimes felt as though he'd been abandoned on the dance floor; left alone in a spotlight with no way to see beyond the stage. No way to see back to her.

It was the most frightening feeling. Hopelessness.

Then the spotlight dimmed and the stage lights came on, soft and beautiful and he could find her again: an exquisite vision, perhaps just as lost as he, but there and real and perfect.

So he took her hand, and they began again.


End file.
